In cultus, the Gnostic docetism and
hyper-spiritualism led consistently to naked intellectual simplicity;
sometimes to the rejection of all sacraments and outward means of
grace; if not even, as in the Prodicians, to blasphemous
self-exaltation above all that is called God and worshiped.822822 Comp. 2 Thess.
2:422

But with this came also the opposite extreme of a
symbolic and mystic pomp, especially in the sect of the Marcosians.
These Marcosians held to a two-fold baptism, that applied to the human
Jesus, the Messiah of the psychical, and that administered to the
heavenly Christ, the Messiah of the spiritual; they decorated the
baptistery like a banquet-hall; and they first introduced extreme
unction. As early as the second century the Basilideans celebrated the
feast of Epiphany. The Simonians and Carpocratians used images of
Christ and of their religious heroes in their worship. The Valentinians
and Ophites sang in hymns the deep longing of Achamoth for redemption
from the bonds of Matter. Bardesanes is known as the first Syrian
hymn-writer. Many Gnostics, following their patriarch, Simon, gave
themselves to magic, and introduced their arts into their worship; as
the Marcosians did in the celebration of the Lord’s
Supper.

Of the outward organization of the Gnostics (with
the exception of the Manichaeans, who will be treated separately), we
can say little. Their aim was to resolve Christianity into a
magnificent speculation; the practical business of organization was
foreign to their exclusively intellectual bent. Tertullian charges them with an entire want of order and
discipline.823823 De Praescr.
Haeret., c. 41.23
They formed, not so much a sect or party, as a multitude of
philosophical schools, like the modern Rationalists. Many were
unwilling to separate at all from the Catholic church, but assumed in
it, as theosophists, the highest spiritual rank. Some were even clothed
with ecclesiastical office, as we must no doubt infer from the
Apostolic Canons (51 or 50), where it is said, with evident reference
to the gloomy, perverse asceticism of the Gnostics: "If a bishop, a
priest, or a deacon, or any ecclesiastic abstain from marriage, from
flesh, or from wine, not for practice in self-denial, but from
disgust,824824βδελυρία.24
forgetting that God made everything very good, that he made also the
male and the female, in fact, even blaspheming the creation;825825βλασφημῶν
διαβάλλει
τὴν
δημιουργίαν
.25 he
shall either retract his error, or be deposed and cast out of the
church. A layman also shall be treated in like manner." Here we
perceive the polemical attitude which the Catholic church was compelled
to assume even towards the better Gnostics.